Rockbox is a free software replacement for the firmware held on various forms of digital audio players (DAPs). Rockbox offers an alternative to the host device's operating system firmware (in many cases without removing the original firmware) which provides a plug-in architecture for adding various enhancements and functionality to DAPs which are not present in the original OS. Enhancements include PDA functionality, applications, utilities, and games. Rockbox can also retrofit video playback functionality onto DAPs first released in mid-2000. Rockbox also includes a voice-driven user-interface suitable for operation by blind and visually impaired users. Rockbox runs on a wide variety of portable audio devices with very different hardware abilities: from early Archos players with 1-bit character cell-based displays to modern players with high resolution color displays, digital optical audio hardware and advanced recording capabilities.
Released under the GNU General Public License, Rockbox is free software.
Codecs
Rockbox on software decoding platforms (non-Archos) supports playback (depending on how you count them) of eight lossy codecs, five lossless, two uncompressed and six miscellaneous formats. This makes a conservative total of 21 supported audio formats, although a few of them do not operate in realtime on all platforms.
MPEG audio layers I-III (MP3/MP2/MP1), Ogg Vorbis, MPEG-4 AAC, Musepack, AC3, WMA, Speex, and the lossy portion of WavPack hybrid files are supported lossy formats. Lossless formats include FLAC, WavPack, Shorten, Apple Lossless and Monkey's Audio. Rockbox plays Intel-style WAV and Apple AIFF uncompressed audio. In addition, there are playback of game audio types ADX, SID, NSF, SAP and SPC. The MOD tracker format is also now supported.[2]
Note that Monkey's Audio support is in the early stages with only the lowest compression settings playing in realtime on most devices. Also note that any file with DRM scheme will not play in Rockbox.
Rockbox features
Beside the ability of playing and recording audio files, Rockbox offers many playback enhancements that other firmwares may not have implemented yet. Listed below are a handful of these features.
- Gapless playback
- Crossfading
- Replay Gain[3]
- 5 band fully parametric equalizer[3]
- Crossfeed[3]
- OTF ("on the fly") playlists
- True random shuffle (fresh randomly shuffled list every time)
- Custom UI themes
- Stereo recording to WAV/AIFF/WavPack (lossless) and MP3[4] (supporting devices)
- FM radio, including FM recording (supporting devices)
- Remote control (supporting devices)
- Digital SPDIF input/output (supporting devices)
- Last.fm support (even on players lacking RTC)
- Cue sheet support
- Changeable selector bar
- Album arthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox#cite_note-4
- Sleep timer
Plug-ins
Rockbox developers can create plug-ins, which provide the user with other enhancements that may not be available on various firmware modules.
Available plug-ins include:
- JPEG viewer (16 bit color/129 shade greyscale)[6]
- Rockboy Game Boy emulator (port of Gnuboy)[7]
- ZXBox ZX Spectrum emulator (port of Spectemu)[8]
- Doom (port of the PrBoom engine)
- WAV to MP3 encoder
- WAV to WavPack encoder
- MPEG video player[1]
- PictureFlow, an album art viewer similar to Apple's Cover Flow
- Various games including sudoku, solitaire, minesweeper, pong and many others (see http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/PluginIndex for an official list of plugins)
- MIDI player, realtime on some targets. Requires external instrument set, available on Rockbox page.
Unimplemented features
Rockbox development is always ongoing. However, either due to the lack of support from external companies or platform drawbacks, Rockbox has a few features which are not yet implemented.
- Firewire
- Digital rights management (or Digital Restrictions Management) (intentionally unimplemented)
- USB host capability ("USB On-The-Go")
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swg-gZjCBr4
ROCKBOX DATA TRANSFER SOFTWARE:
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main...tility#Download
Notice:
Rockbox Hacks Your Ipod & Adds Rockbox OS Alongside Ipod Os As A Dual Booting Systen, Thus Voids Your Warranty. But On the added benefit of extra codecs & you also get extra games & Applications.
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